A Man of Large Friendly Letters

At 5' 2", I spent most of my time in England being shorter than those around me. Then one day when a few of us were drunk enough to have categorically cool ideas and sober enough to be able to execute them, we decided to play a little game where I stood on a chair and everyone else sort of scooched down and so both sides knew what the other felt like! Maybe it had more to do with the vodka than the chair but this was a world so utterly different from the one that I normally inhabited that it was as if I had been smacked in the face with some sort of a height-racket.

Now, imagine a very funny author instead of the chair, and imagine life, the universe and everything instead of height and you might get an idea of what I went through when I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The author in question was of course Douglas Adams.

Douglas Noel Adams (or DNA which I know he quite liked) is usually described as the writer of a series of comic science fiction novels. But it wasn't until I read this description somewhere that I realised that it was science fiction.

A- Because with DNA's books, as with Wodehouse's writing, the actual plot matters very little. What you are really after is the next ridiculous metaphor, the next brilliant transferred epithet, the next rant about the wicked ways of the world, the next sentence that just as you are about to finish it, turns itself upside down and takes your brain with it!
And B- Because he never told you anything. He just went on and on about some random thing or another until you went, 'Ah! I think what you're trying to say is...' and felt very pleased and clever indeed for having arrived at the end of the thought process a moment before this poor baffled author could. There are few greater pleasures that a reader or an audience can share with an artist.

He was a lover of science and a lover of art. He showed me that Science is as much a matter of romance and passion and humour and wonder and inspiration as art and art as much about practice and frustration and calculation and knowledge and boredom and helplessness and -ultimately- enlightenment as science.

He made me appreciate the idea of existentialism without my even realising it (which is more than I can say for all those mainstream existentialists with their heavy handed depression and homicidal holiday-makers) and this he did with stories of spaceships and galaxies and cows and fish. He never put you off with talk of 'serious issues' and 'ethical imperatives'. He was always on your side... by your side, probably pointing at something and letting you in on some absurd inside-joke that was bound to make you giggle. It seems if an idea seemed important to him then it also deserved to be amusing, and wherever possible... hilarious!

I owe a lot of what I have found and loved since I came across the hitchiker's guide – be it in literature or music or films or science-to him. But I also owe a lot of what I have written since then to him. Because as a writer who found it essentially impossible to write for the most part he has been my biggest source of inspiration and my brightest ray of hope! It is because of DNA that I can say bollocks to those who think that all great artists just go around spewing out brilliancies, spending all their lives in a bubble of pure genius with a special spot for 'inspiration' in their brains where normal people have itching or wanting toast.

It is because of him that I know that writing is a lot of hard work and requires a great deal of sitting idle and feeling hopeless. The key is to just get on with the sitting. If your forehead starts to bleed, that's a good start!

It is because of him that even in the most desperate of times, I 'Don't Panic'.



(This is actually a very old piece but turns out I completely forgot to post it here!)

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

If you haven't been to http://www.sotsog42.blogspot.com/ yet, do have a read... and then maybe even a write! :)

I miss England. Part of it is being torn away from the work I loved so much but it’s not just that. I miss the streets, the trees, the buses, the people, the food, the drink, the music, the TV, the charity shops, the books, the thoughts, the fun. What’s more, I’ve developed a reluctant dislike for most of their Indian counterparts or lack of the same. I always used to look down upon people who had been to another country- most likely in Europe or America- and now constantly rambled on about how India didn’t have half the wondrous things that made life worth living. But now, I find myself doing the same more often than I can unashamedly admit. Well, I at least try not to say it out loud even if I’m thinking it. Because even though it’s not voluntary at all, I’m not sure if I’m right in feeling this way. I love India; I’m proud of India. But it’s like having two people inside my head, constantly arguing; both thinking the other a hypocrite for refusing to see what is obvious.

Do I not love my own country? Do I think it’s okay to be ungrateful to everyone and everything that helped me go and see England in the first place? Does India not have scientists and musicians who can blow your mind with their creations? Didn’t some of the best friendships of my life happen to me in India? Weren’t the british just a bunch of imperialist fuckheads who thought it alright to go to wherever they wanted and bully people into slavery? Aren’t people in both countries equally obnoxious when it comes to religion? Aren’t the politicians in both countries equally stupid? Equally incompetent? Equally missing the point? If nothing else, judging by my own example, can an Indian not share my notions, opinions and sensibilities? What right do I have then to feel so self-importantly different and un-understood?

Not all these questions are rhetorical. The fuckheads are in the past and so are many of the things and people that are behind everything valuable and awe-inspiring about my country; locked away in that same period of history if not in an older one. But again, that’s all quite beside the point. What it is, is not being able to find a place to belong or having found a voice you want to listen to and agree with, which not many around you can hear because it’s coming from so damn far away. And it’s a little about not knowing whether the film you are in is Donnie Darko or Dev D or Lost in Translation or The Motorcycle Diaries. As far as that last one goes, something tells me I’m not the only one.

American Gods

Many a myth and legends be

That tell of blood and sacrifice

Many a tale of vicious gods

But few of dismal godly vice.

The tale unfolds a thousand pasts.

Across the seas and back again.

Imprisoned, wrecked or rescued souls,

Some of gods and some of men.

Talks and tricks and thunderbirds

Cloak-and-dagger cons and coins

Maddening hopes and madder still

The riot when the realm rejoins.

A menacing storm looms and hums,

No self, no name, no age, no death

Can weave a life for those you made

If not for you, if not for faith!

So the story breathes and bleeds

Laughs and loves and sings and cries

This, a tale of troubled gods,

This, a tale of godly vice.

Thought I might add this here...

This is one of the very few things that I've done that actually make me feel cool! :)

http://cowbirdsinlove.com/834

‘What is it that’s lost when you cross a border? Each moment seems to be split in two. Melancholy for what was left behind and on the other hand, all the enthusiasm at entering new lands'

(The Motorcycle Diaries)

Finally, the time has come for me to go back. It still doesn’t seem real, none of it. Neither the fact that I’ve been here for 14 months nor that in about a week I won’t be anymore. The day we knew for sure that I was going to come to York, my mum said she felt exactly the way she did when I was starting school. And sure enough it was just that all over again. An event that would mean that I would have to leave home, that I would meet new people and make new friends, that I would find new interests, start dressing differently, that there would be things I wouldn’t be able to wait to share with everyone at home and that there would be things that I couldn’t tell them.

It has been a good year. I met wonderful people and saw literally magical places. (I’m definitely not the first to discover that if you see the Yorkshire moors, it’s Tolkien’s middle earth... it’s all here!)It has taught me a lot and the things that have happened within this period have given me peace and pains and pleasures in parts of my mind that I didn’t know I had.

Call it a full circle or whatever you will but I remember being excited and devastated in equal parts when I left India, and now that I’m going back it’s the same feeling. Yes, home will always be home and it’s a very different kind of devastation but I look back on the year that I spent in those two houses on Tang Hall Lane and I can’t help thinking... I may never see those places ever again... and when I’m sitting in my lovely house in Pune – sunny, warm and infested with marvellously wilful dogs and people- those houses will seem like two tiny little dots so far away in time and space that soon I won’t be able to touch them even in my memories...

I won't panic!

So there is a Hitchhiker's sequel that has recently come out. It's called And another thing. The title comes from a line in So long and thanks for all the fish that goes:
'The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying "And another thing..." twenty minutes after admitting he's lost the argument.'

As much as I appreciate how clever the title is, it's also kind of sad; exactly like a man saying 'and another thing' when there's nothing he could possibly say that would make any difference. I'm sure that Eoin Colfer is a brilliant writer and the fact that he is the one writing the 6th book in the Hitchhiker's trilogy means that I'm going to get my hands on all his other books the first chance I get and find out what he has been upto all these years. But why would he write a hitchhiker's book? Why would anyone?

It's not like we read all those books for the stories. No one's going mad asking 'what happened next?'. I'm not sure people even got their heads around what happened in the first five books. But we didn't care. We didn't even notice. The whole point of all those books was having a tiny peeping window into this whirlwind of a genius that was Douglas Noel Adams's mind! They were basically DNA's guides to the galaxy. I'm not really bothered that much about another h2g2. What I really want is another couple of hundred pages full of ideas and language stamped 'DOUGLAS ADAMS'.
I'm dying for another sentence like:
'The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.'

Maybe Eoin Colfer will have come up with things like that; even better ones. But if a dear friend dies and then you meet another person- someone just as funny, just as witty, just as fantastically sharp and just as keen- you'd still miss knowing what your old friend would have done, said.
By the time I had finished Mostly Harmless, DNA was an old friend.
And my only real apprehension about this new book is that with every word, it will make me think of how much I would love for him to be alive and writing again.
I don't like that feeling. It hurts more than you might think. I don't like the fact that I'm going to have to read And another thing anyway. And it doesn't matter whether it's terrific and worthy of the title or not. It will still hurt. It's somewhat of a perfect lose-lose situation.
I feel cheated for having this touchy part of my tiny universe disturbed and I want to run away and keep running till I find someone who'll tell me what to do or think or feel. Someone like Douglas Adams.
But if I were to refer to the guide right now, before it told me anything else- anything at all about sci-fi sequels, dead authors, lose-lose scenarios or being a sentimental dupe- it would give me the most helpful advice there is to give in this world (written in large friendly letters on the cover). It would say:

Don't Panic

So I won't!